Washington's way of counting votes is just silly

Updated 10:00 pm, Sunday, November 8, 2009

Nov. 13, 2012

SEATTLE -- A full week after Election Day, the race between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney boils down to the outcome of a vote count without end in the state of Washington.

Hanging chads on Florida ballots have been replaced by Washington's hanging returns. Each day, populous King County delivers vote totals that favor the 44th president, while Eastern and Southwest Washington counties boost his challenger's majorities.

If Obama wins Washington -- he currently leads by 133 votes -- he will eke out a 272-electoral vote majority, enough to secure a second term. Romney will become the nation's 45th president if he becomes the first Republican since Ronald Reagan in 1984 to take Washington.

How did the country find itself without a winner long after the ballot count was supposed to be complete?

Every other state mandates that ballots be in the hands of election officials when polls close on election night. Even Oregon, when it went to mail-in voting, included such a requirement -- with ample places for voters to drop off ballots on Election Day. By contrast, Washington only requires that votes be postmarked on Election Day. Democratic organizers were dropping off ballots at a Sea-Tac, Washington, post office after 11 p.m. They've been described as "election thieves in the night" by Republican radio pundit Rush Limbaugh.

"I've asked the Legislature to change the law," said Secretary of State Sam Reed. He's been asking lawmakers for a full decade, without success.

Joel Connelly has been a staff columnist for more than 30 years. He comments regularly on politics and public policy.

The vote count in many states was complete on election night before midnight.

Here, however, King County Elections issued a single set of returns at 8:15 p.m. and was silent for the rest of the night. Nearby Pierce County ran more than an hour behind its predictions of when results would be issued.

The result has been an open-air political circus in the midst of the Northwest's rainy season.

David Broder, the Washington Post pundit, experienced his second fender-bender car accident while covering politics in the "other" Washington. (The first was in 1998.) Larry King of CNN has come up with original pronunciations ("Spo-KANE," "Ya-KIMA") of familiar Washington place names. A Fox News anchor stumbled through three pronunciations for the town of Puyallup.

An "Acorn Festival" in Whatcom County, a place where Obama is winning, drew producer Jesse Watters from Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" and a film crew. The event turned out to be an exchange of recipes for dishes made from Acorn Squash.

The final vote count may not be final.

A team of Republican lawyers arrived from Washington, D.C., yesterday, ready to challenge "special" ballots cast in pro-Democratic counties by voters claiming not to have received or to have lost mailed ballots. The Democrats have in place a crack team of legal election experts at the Perkins Coie law firm.

"This could go to court and last until June: Our governor's race did eight years ago," said Hamilton Ginsberg, an election attorney with divided loyalties.

Washington waited two weeks after the 2000 election to learn that Democrat Maria Cantwell had upset GOP Sen. Slade Gorton. Seattle cooled its heels for nine days in 2001 before learning the identity of its new mayor. The count and recount in 2009 dragged on for days.

The 2005 court battle that confirmed election of Gov. Chris Gregoire (defeated last Tuesday in her bid for a third term) did not end until June. It was mid-summer of 2009 before Minnesota voters learned that Al Franken was their new senator.

Of course, America cannot wait.

The electoral college tally will be counted immediately after the new Congress convenes in January. Obama, or his successor, will be sworn in on January 20.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who arrived Sunday as a vote count observer, summed up growing impatience with the "other" Washington. "This is the worst disaster since I became president," Carter declared.

But life here goes on, at times seeming oblivious to the frenzy of national and international media attention.

The lead story on local TV news was a November rainstorm that sent chum salmon from the Skokomish River swimming down the center of a flooded U.S. Route 101.

Columnist Joel Connelly has written about politics for the P-I since 1973.